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Shaping the Future of the Newspaper

SFN Blog

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Every newsroom should have its own seer. Not to predict the next breaking news story (that’s half the fun of being a journalist, surely?) but to foresee how the newspaper model will change and adapt in the future. Keeping a news title abreast of the latest technological and economic challenges is part and parcel of an editor’s role, and is a task that has been rendered all the more urgent over the past two decades as technological advances and a difficult economic climate.

Even without the services of an in-house sibyl, editors have long been second-guessing how content production, publication and delivery will evolve – sometimes with alarming success. The Kaiser memo, written in 1992 by then- managing editor of The Washington Post, Robert Kaiser, is startlingly accurate in many of its predictions. After being told of an impending digital revolution by leading lights in the world of technology, who spoke with certainty of a time when “the PC will be a virtual supercomputer, and the easy transmission and storage of large quantities of text, moving and still pictures, graphics,” Kaiser recommended that the Post get ahead of its competitors by designing “the world’s first electronic newspaper… with a series of ‘front pages’ and other devices that would guide readers the way our traditional cues do -- headlines, captions, story placement, etc.”

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Just 10 weeks after start-up incubator Betaworks acquired its brand name and URL, the new-look Digg is celebrating its one-month anniversary.

Sporting a pared-down, picture-heavy, ad-free homepage, the site has been dubbed “a Pinterest for news links.” The voting algorithm that was a defining feature of Digg’s previous incarnation remains (though human editors also play a role in curating the site) and articles like "The Five Coolest (and 5 Strangest) Marvel Comics Foodstuffs" prove that its audience has lost none of its interest in the more bizarre elements of the news.

There are however clear signs that not everyone is diggin’ the new format. Initial reaction to the re-launched website lamented the loss of key Digg functions, and four weeks have done little to assuage such concerns. Despite being a central reason for Digg’s initial popularity, the old commenting system has disappeared and users are required to sign in via their Facebook account should they want to interact with articles.

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This is a guest post from Garrett Goodman, an American living and working in Paris for a French collaborative journalism startup called Citizenside. He writes on innovations in journalism and social media on The Huffington Post, and is a technology enthusiast, gadget fanatic, and avid amateur photographer. Follow Garrett on Twitter for a regular flow of interesting articles on all of the above: @garrettgoodman.

In a time of acute financial struggle for most media houses, weekly newspaper The Economist announced record profits and record circulation for last year. In the group's 2012 annual report, editorial events was cited by numerous managing directors as an important part of the publication's strategy.

This is a closer look at The Economist Group's event strategy: how it fosters audience engagement, generates millions in revenue, and attracts new readers.

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The Newspaper Association for America (NAA) is said to be preparing a legal challenge to a “sweetheart deal” established between the postal service and Valassis Communications.

Having received approval from the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, the agreement will see Valassis receive a substantial rate-cut from the post office, thereby allowing the direct-marketing company to send the kind of preprint advertisements usually carried by newspapers straight to the customer. The mailing system will cost 42 percent less than the service now provided by newspapers.

Newspapers could see advertising revenue diminish by $2.5 billion as a result of the agreement, of which $1 billion could be businesses turning away from the newspaper advertising model altogether.

Allowing the public access to your reporting process, and accepting more and different contributors than you’d find through traditional means," is really what social is all about, according to Daniel Victor, Social Media Producer at The New York Timesin an interview with Muck Rack.

This spring brought cutbacks to the New Orleans Times-Picayune and three Alabama dailies. Now, Advance newspapers in Syracyse, New York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania are the latest to follow suit.

“It seems like they are doing this in regional clusters,” said Paul Pohlman, a Poynter faculty member with knowledge of Advance, according to a report by Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon.

As of January 2013, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, whose 24 year-old reporter Sara Ganim won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for her work on the scandal at Penn State University, will appear in print only three days a week. The newspaper will merge with the website Pennlive.com to form PA Media Group.

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The Newsblaster project was developed by the Columbia NLP (natural language processing) Group and has been running since September 2001. Under the direction of Professor Kathleen McKeown, the site processes news stories through the application of natural language processing techniques and artificial intelligence, to produce summaries of the day’s top news stories. After 11 years at the helm, Professor McKeown spoke to the SFN blog to discuss the development of Newsblaster, and what the future holds for the aggregation site.

SFN: In the 11 years that Newsblaster has been running, what types of changes has the site undergone?

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Which GOP governor is the weakest link? Which democrat senator wants to marry a multi-millionaire? The New York Times’ David Carr consults top authorities in the world of reality television about how the U.S. Republican and Democratic National Conventions could spice up their images.

"At one point, when he was about 24, he took off into the Tasmanian wilderness with just a knife and pitted himself against nature to see if he could survive out there," says Julian Assange’s mother of her son in the Guardian’s compilation of testimonies from the whistleblower’s nearest and dearest.

Pasadena publisher James Macpherson claims to have received death threats five years ago when he began hiring workers in India to write local news stories. Now he has launched Journtent, a system for helping other publishers outsource local reporting. CJR reports.

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British newspapers experienced a sporting spike in digital traffic during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

To take an example, the Guardian saw a 23 percent increase in average daily unique browsers, a 21 percent rise in average daily visits, and a 15 percent jump in average daily page views during the Olympics, as compared with figures from 17 days before the Opening Ceremonies. Not including mobile traffic, the site attracted a total of 39.9 million page views – 2.3 million per day, on average – between July 27 and August 12 for Olympic content alone.

As print circulation continues its long luge ride – the Guardian’s dropped by another 15.85 percent between July 2011 and July 2012 to 209,354, a rate of decline outpaced only by the Independent, which dropped by 54.28 percent to reach below 83,619 – such news is particularly welcome.